One of the best parts of publishing online is that, on the Web, anyone can have a world-wide reach. But while being global is made easy on the Internet, ensuring that the content you produce will be found by the right audience can be a real challenge. Search engines can have trouble understanding geotargeting because of a few technical limitations. These include: Search engines may not be crawling your site from the location of your customers. Search engines may not execute JavaScript, which can break some targeting methods that rely on self-selection or JavaScript-based redirection. There’s no standardized way to tell a search engine which region or language your content’s targeted...
One of the most common challenges search engines run into when indexing a website is identifying and consolidating duplicate pages. Duplicates can occur when any given webpage has multiple URLs that point to it. For example: URL Description http://mysite.com A webmaster may consider this their authoritative or canonical URL for their homepage. http://www.mysite.com However, you can add 'www' to most websites and still get the same home page. http://mysite.com/default.aspx You can also often add the specific filename of the homepage and get the same page http://mysite.com/default.aspx?promo=ABC Many times websites use parameters to track things like where customers are coming from (in this case...
Everyone knows great content is fundamental to the success of your site. It is the reason people are looking for your site and it is why they will stay. In the previous three posts from this series, we have discussed how large sites need to expose fewer URLs , how you can help search engines crawl more efficiently , and how not to unintentionally hide your content from crawlers . The common thread here is that we, the search engines, want to have better access to the content that matters on your site. The reason for this? Content goes a long way in establishing the value of your website for each visitor and for us as a search engine. There is one important truth: search engines like content....
We’re excited to be headed to SMX West and participating in a number of panels and other events next week. We’ll be there to talk about all the usual searchy things you love and we will have plenty of folks (Nathan as well as a few new faces) on hand to help you with your Webmaster Center or search-related questions. If you have a specific question about your site, or you just want to meet the people who work on Live Search, be sure to swing by. Be sure to bring your business card – we’re holding a raffle for a new Xbox! >:-D If you want to hear members of the Live Search team speak, you can find us on the following panels: Tuesday, February 10 Marketer to Developer Translation 1:15-2:30pm...
Working with large sites often means being a part of a large organization, which brings its own set of challenges. Many stakeholders with different agendas or needs influence how sites are structured. Within larger organizations, there are long to-do lists and a lack of understanding of the impact certain designs or architecture choices can have on the ability of the search engine to index the site. In our past two articles on large site optimization, we have talked about how to help us crawl your site more efficiently and the need to reduce the number of URLs you expose . However, due to the diverse needs of some organizations, the issue isn’t that you share too many URLs. Instead, some websites...
